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STIX MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 











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SIX MARKS OF A 
CHRISTIAN 


BY 
CANON ALLAN P. SHATFORD, M.A., D.C.L. 


RECTOR, 8T. JAMES THE APOSTLE, MONTREAL 
FELLOW GOVERNOR McGILL UNIVERSITY 


“TI bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus” 


RY OF PRINCE? 









pe 


THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY 
Chicago Philadelphia Toronto 


Copyright, 1925, by 
Tur Joun C. Winston Company 





PRINTED IN THE U.S. A. 
AT THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS 
TuE Joun C, WINSTON CoMPANY, PROPRS., PHILADELPHIA 


PREFACE 


In the present conflict over dogmas 
and traditions, in the strife between 
modernists and fundamentalists, and 
in the hurry and bustle of modern con- 
ditions, it is to be feared that the real 
principles of Christianity have almost 
been lost sight of by many who call 
themselves Christians. It was there- 
fore distinctly refreshing to the writer 
of this brief note to hear these remark- 
able talks on practical Christianity 
given by Canon Shatford. They em- 
phasize in a plain, straightforward 
manner that those who profess to be 
followers of Jesus Christ should let such 
be known by manifesting in all their 

7 


PREFACE 


activities—domestic, social, political, 
and religious—those cardinal virtues 
that were such outstanding marks in 
the lives of the Saviour and His great 
apostle. 

Canon Shatford has been kind 
enough to approve of this transcription 
of his words and to consent to their 
publication. Doubtless many who 
formed part of the large and apprecia- 
tive audiences that have heard these 
talks will welcome the opportunity to 
read them over; and many who did 
not hear them will find help and 
encouragement in the stirring message 
they bring. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
MORE WORD Sarit set ste oe ne ores oe He 

LGB eye Wiig aig BOS ERE Hee eee 15 
Dis COURAGE bee srl anes Mace are as de 35 
VUTep EP ATUONCH TS Sy Poe os owe ee els 53 
EV eo TOMGRa tS ce ae ere cs cies on 71 
NV tee PREDOMI se ark stig icv aise ciobeanealN ah 89 


Gamrmosrry for as OCA Se aoe eee 107 


ye) 


FAN 





FOREWORD 


The addresses printed in this little 
volume were originally delivered to 
large audiences in Philadelphia. 

They were taken down in short- 
hand and written out by Mr. John W. 
Lea, to whom I am very greatly in- 
debted for revision. The talks retain 
all the earmarks of spoken addresses 
and little attempt has been made to 
cast them in literary form. 

It is needless to say that I owe 
much to my reading for the ideas and 
illustrations of these addresses, and I 
thankfully pay tribute to my helpers. 

May this little book be a blessing to 
all who read it! 


ADs. 


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LOYALTY 


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4 


LOYALTY 


St. Paul once said: “I bear branded 
on my body the marks of Jesus.” 

It is a very graphic figure. The man 
who wrote it was a prisoner at the 
time. He wanted some striking illus- 
tration of spiritual truth, and looking 
around he noticed that everything 
about him was marked and stamped 
with the sign of the imperial Ceesar. 
The clothes of the jailer were marked. 
The utensils that he used were stamped. 
The chains on his own wrist were 
branded with the mark of the Emperor. 
Even the guard who came in to wait 
on him had stamped in the palm of his 
hand the initial of the Emperor, de- 

15 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


claring to all the world whose servant 
he was and who was his master. 

And then Paul said to himself, “I 
also bear branded on my body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus.” He pulled 
up his sleeve, and there was a great 
mark that he had received when he 
was: at Philippi. He uncovered his 
shoulder, and there was a great red 
welt that had been left there when he 
was stoned at Lystra. And so his 
body was stamped and marked with 
the signs of his Master. He said, 
“These marks declare to all the world 
whose I am and whom I serve.” 

I want to take this figure as 
an illustration of certain signs and 
marks which every Christian ought to 
bear, declaring to all the world who 
his Master is and whose servant he is. 
The first mark that I wish to talk to 
you about is the mark of Loyalty. 
St. Paul certainly had loyalty, for you 

16 


LOYALTY 


remember that on more than one 
occasion he was asked to deny his Lord; 
they told him that he would suffer 
great affliction if he still persisted in 
loyalty to his new Master. And Paul 
on every occasion gave back the 
answer: “It matters not. I give my 
body to be burned. I will sacrifice 
everything. I hold nothing in this 
world dear. I count everything loss 
for Jesus Christ, and I will be loyal to 
Him, no matter what happens.” 

In this Paul was like his Master; 
for I want to say this about these marks 
of a Christian, that they were all found 
upon the Master himself. And both 
upon Him and upon us these marks 
are all of a very practical character 
and bear upon the ordinary relations 
of our everyday life. 

Jesus never went back on a friend. 
He was loyal to His God all through 
His life. “I come to do Thy will, O 

2 17 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


God,” He said. No temptation could 
draw His feet aside from the path that 
He had marked for himself. He 
walked loyally from the cradle to the 
grave, never flinching on one single 
occasion. 





Hath He marks to lead me to Him, 
If He be my Guide? 

In His hands and feet are wound-prints, 
And His side. 


The mark of loyalty was found upon 
the personality of Jesus and upon the 
life of Paul, and must be upon the life 
of everyone who would follow Him as 
a disciple. 

Loyalty, to my mind, seems to be 
very much required at this present 
juncture. For what is the opposite 
of loyalty? Lawlessness. I do not 
think there ever was a time when law- 
lessness was so marked as it is at this 
present time. All authority seems to 

18 


LOYALTY 


have gone by the board. Just come 
with me and look at the home for a 
moment. Is there the same loyalty in 
the home that there used to be? Is 
there the same authority exercised by 
the parents? Somebody said that 
there is as much authority in the home 
as there ever was, but the children 
are exercising it; and I am afraid 
that it is only too true. The decline 
of loyalty in the home is one of the 
paramount signs of a degenerate civili- 
zation. 

Look at the state, and do you find 
very marked loyalty there? Are the 
citizens loyal to all the laws? Why, 
we know that there has been a wave of 
crime over this continent that has 
simply shaken things to their very 
foundations. Often law is disregarded, 
and some of the laws on our statute- 
book are held in scorn, so that certain 
men take a good deal of pride and satis- 

19 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





faction in breaking the law. Now, 
whatever you may say about a law, as 
long as it exists on the statute-book 
there is only one thing for a citizen to 
do; that is, be loyal to it. He may 
argue and agitate for its change, but 
as long as it is there as the will of the 
people, he must be loyal to the law of 
the land. For if you break down one 
law, and wink at its being disregarded, 
you bring all law into disfavor; and 
that is why we have so much lawless- 
ness today. It has crept even into the 
church, so that there is a great deal 
of disloyalty being manifested among 
churches today, and we have men in 
high positions who are demanding their 
freedom and continually declaring they 
can no longer be loyal to the law. Dis- 
loyalty seems to be eating the very 
heart out of civilization. If there is 
not a check very soon put upon it, 
where are we going to arrive? Do we 
20 


LOYALTY 





bear branded on our lives this mark of 
the Lord Jesus? 

I want to talk very frankly and 
simply with you about this idea of 
loyalty, for I believe it is at the foun- 
dation of all healthy civilization and 
of all healthy church life. We must get 
back, after all, to the individual, for 
the home and the nation and the 
church are only aggregates of the in- 
dividual. And if the individuals will 
not regard law, and refuse to manifest 
a loyalty to existing institutions, how 
is it possible for the future to be safe- 
guarded? 

The one thing we must do is to bring 
about loyalty to the great Master. 
You know the secret of all good life is 
to have some central personality, some 
control in your life, some power that 
will knit all your life together, so that 
you can pay to that supreme person- 
ality the loyalty that will make for the 

21 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





strengthening of the life. And because 
I find a tendency to break away from 
loyalty to the personality of Jesus, 
there, I think, is the secret of all the 
lawlessness and disloyalty that is being 
practiced through our country just 
now. We must get back to that 
central loyalty to Christ. We are His 
servants by the fact of our creation 
and redemption. He has sealed us 
with His name. We bear upon us the 
mark of our imperial Cesar, the Christ. 
He owns us, and we are stamped by 
Him. There is but one thing for us to 
do, and that is to be loyal to Him. 
Hawthorne tells us a very beautiful 
story. I do not know exactly what its 
point is, but I will make a guess at it. 
He tells of a man who married, and his 
wife was a very beautiful woman, but 
there was a difficulty: she had a birth- 
mark upon her face,and they were very 
anxious to remove it. At last the 
22 


LOYALTY 





husband secured a combination of 
chemicals that would take it away, and 
finally the mark died away and dis- 
appeared, just as a rainbow dies out of _ 
the sky. But, the moment it was 
gone, the woman died. What can we 
learn from this story? Surely, that if 
we are stamped in the image of God, 
we have the birth-mark upon us; we 
belong to God, and any disobedience, 
any wandering away from Him, is dis- 
loyalty. If we try to rub out that 
mark of Christ’s ownership it is death, 
spiritual death, the worst kind of 
death. So you must have then, first of 
all, loyalty to one master; and where 
is there a Master more worthy of being 
followed and served than this Man 
whom we call Christ Jesus? 

Let me say another thing about 
loyalty, and that is that we must try 
to be loyal in little things. It is not in 
the great things of life that men prove 

23 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





disloyal; it is usually in the small 
things. Do you remember, it was the 
man with the one talent that was un- 
faithful, not the man with two or the 
man with five, but the man with one? 
True it is that he that is faithful in 
little will be faithful also in much; and 
the man who takes care as to small 
loyalties, when the great emergency 
comes up against his life will stand fast 
and loyal. But it is in the filching 
away of the little things, by the little 
acts of immodesty, that the girl will 
surrender and at last set her foot upon 
the road of shame until she finds her- 
self in the slough of impurity, from 
which she cannot extricate herself. 
The little act of dishonesty by the boy 
in the shop, or the man in his business, 
at length leads to the great disloyalty 
until the bankruptcy or the misappro- 
priation of funds by some man in high 
position shocks the community. It 
24 


LOYALTY 





shocks the community only because we 
could not see the gradual process, the 
gradual eating away through little con- 
cessions and compromises and _ sur- 
renders. It is true that he that is 
faithful in little will be faithful also in 
much. 

The other day I went into a winter 
hotel, and there were a lot of people 
seated around a table and evidently 
playing some kind of gambling game. 
Of course there were money and chips 
there, and one whom I happened to 
know got up somewhat embarrassed. 
“‘Oh,” he said to me, “‘we are not play- 
ing for a very high stake. We are 
playing for only five cents a point!” 
As though it made any difference in the 
principle of the thing whether it was 
five cents or one thousand dollars. If 
it is wrong to gamble, it is wrong to 
gamble for the small as well as it is for 
the large. When women tell me that 

25 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





there is nothing wrong in playing for 
such small stakes, I say, “You are 
surrendering the principle. It will 
bring you at last into the great dis- 
loyalty.” You cannot bring up chil- 
dren, making these little concessions, 
without teaching them that after all 
there is no principle involved, that it is 
only a matter of the quantity or 
amount and not the principle. On 
the contrary, it is eternally true that 
the man that is loyal in the small 
things will be loyal in the large. I 
say to you, young men, and I say to 
you, old men, but particularly to the 
young people, “Watch carefully the 
small things. Never be guilty of 
making a compromise in minor matters. 
Take care of these little things, and 
then you need never fear the great 
emergency, because, having been in 
the habit and custom of loyalty all 
through your life, you will be aware 
26 


LOYALTY 


when the great temptation comes.” 

Let me say another thing about 
loyalty. Loyalty is the only way by 
which we can get more light, by which 
more knowledge will come to us. If 
you are loyal to your friend, is not he 
always giving you revelations of him- 
self? But if you are disloyal to him, 
he shuts himself up against you at 
once, and there can be no further 
privilege in his friendship. If we are 
loyal to God, God will reveal Himself 
more and more, according to our 
loyalty. As Jesus said, “Ii any man 
will do My will, he shall know of the 
doctrine.”’ It is only by obedience, by 
our loyalty, that God reveals Himeelf. 
Or, take the Bible. Only as you are 
loyal to the truth you know will more 
truth come to you. Sometimes men 
are puzzled as to why things are so 
mysterious. If you are refusing to do 
the duty which is plain to you now, 

Q7 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


how can you expect God to reveal a 
further duty and more illumination 
until you have done what already is so 
plain to you? 


I do not ask to see 
The distant scene; one step enough for me. 


If we take that one step, then the 
way will be more and more opened up. 
And so it is by our loyalty that we can 
enjoy larger knowledge and more mag- 
nificent revelations until the whole 
seems to reveal itself to us in one great 
burst of magnificent revelation—all 
because we bear upon our lives the 
mark of the Lord Jesus, the mark of 
loyalty. 

Sometimes there comes a conflict of 
loyalty. Here are two persons or two 
things, and they both seem to have an 
appeal to you. The other day a 
young man came to me and said, “Sir, 

28 


LOYALTY 





I am in a great perplexity. I am in 
business. My employer has been good 
to me for ten years, has carried me 
along, and nursed, and encouraged me; 
but now he asks me to do something to 
which I cannot reconcile my conscience. 
Also, I am the only support of my 
mother. I feel a loyalty to my home. 
If I am thrown out of this position I 
am endangering my mother’s happi- 
ness. There seems to be a conflict of 
loyalty.” I said, ““My son, it is not a 
question of loyalty to your mother or 
loyalty to your employer; it is a ques- 
tion of loyalty to your own conscience 
and loyalty to the right—loyalty to 
Jesus. If you keep this ever dominant 
in your mind, all other questions will 
be very easily solved.” 

You remember that when Queen 
Victoria went to St. Paul’s Cathedral 
to give thanks to God for the recovery 
of the Prince of Wales, Tennyson wrote 

29 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


a very beautiful poem, and this was 
the first line: 


O loyal to the royal in thyself! 


I think that all loyalties are summed 
up in that sentence. Be loyal to God. 
Be loyal to the highest that is in you. 
Never smother the voice of conscience. 
Never try to drown that still small 
voice within you that says, “Stand 
right; be true; make no concessions; 
be loyal—loyal to thyself.”’ 


To thine own self be true, 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man. 


When the Waldensians lost their 
leader, he was a young man, still in his 
thirties, but his hair was as white as 
the driven snow. And as they gathered 
around his bier to say the last farewell, 

30 


LOYALTY 





one came forward and took up his 
silken gray hair in his hands and said, 
“Comrades, this is the mark of his 
loyalty; he became white-haired and 
stricken because he was loyal to our 
cause.” It wrung a cheer from that 
great crowd and thrilled them with the 
desire to go out also and manifest in 
their own lives this mark of the Lord 
Jesus. 

That is the first mark, the mark of 
Loyalty—loyalty in little things, loyalty 
in inward things, loyalty in the home, 
loyalty in the church, loyalty in the 
state, loyalty in business. Wherever 
you may be, let this be manifested in 
your life, and then you will be a worthy 
disciple of Jesus Christ. 


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II 
COURAGE 


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COURAGE 


We are studying the marks of a 
Christian. We have considered Loy- 
alty as one of the essential marks of a 
Christian; now, I want to consider 
another just as_ essential, that is, 
Courage. I would recall to your mind 
the apostle’s words, “I bear branded 
on me the marks of the Lord Jesus.” 

All thesemarks, I said, are to be found 
in the life of the Master, as also in His 
disciples. The man who wrote that 
motto was Paul; therefore let me give 
you an illustration of his courage. He 
was stoned at Lystra so that they 
picked him up in the street for dead. 
His body was marked with the anger 

35 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





and persecution of the multitude. But 
after he recovered he said that he was 
going back to Lystra again. He was 
not dismayed nor discouraged. They 
said to him, “‘ You are foolish to return 
to the place of your defeat.” He 
answered, “‘I am not defeated.” And 
back he went to Lystra and faced the 
angry mob again, so splendid was his 
courage. St. Paul has been called 
“the undiscourageable”; and every 
disciple of the Master should manifest 
a similar quality in his life. 

Jesus was one of the most courageous 
souls of history. You read His life 
and it gives you a total impression of 
bravery. Nothing ever turned Him 
back. He faced the howling mob. He 
went out against the stoutest opposi- 
tion of His time. He was not afraid 
even of the bloodthirsty Herod; for 
when they sent a message to Him from 
Herod He merely said, “You go back 

36 


COURAGE 


NE 
and tell that old fox, that today and 
tomorrow I continue My work; even 
though he with all his entrenched 
power warns Me, I am not frightened.” 
And He went forward with the same 
courage and steadfastness which at 
length brought Him to the cross. 
Courage is an essential mark of a 
Christian. Sometimes I think that 
we need this virtue particularly in our 
age and generation; for while we show 
certain manifestations of courage, I 
think as a people we are not particularly 
noteworthy for our bravery. Men 
make all kinds of excuses for not follow- 
ing religion. I think if they were to 
give the real reason it would be because 
they haven’t the pluck. Religion is 
not an easy matter. Christianity is 
one of the most difficult things in the 
world, and young people turn back 
because they have not the courage to 
meet the requirements of Christianity. 
37 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


When somebody said that Christian- 
ity during the World War had been 
tried and found wanting, Chesterton 
replied, ““No, it has been found diffi- 
cult, and never tried.” There is much 
truth in that. We have not had the 
courage to face the emergencies and 
the demands of Christianity. I would 
say first of all to you, “Don’t evade 
the issue, but stand up loyally to all 
the dangers that are to be met in all the 
emergencies of life.’ 

Carlyle said that there is a hero and 
a coward in every man, and most of us 
will admit it. What religion means is 
to develop the heroic in man and not 
the cowardly. And yet, when I look 
at churches and Christians today, I 
wonder if any man would be impressed 
by their courage. They seem to be 
such a timid and halting lot. “Safety 
first” appears to be the motto of 
Christians today. They get behind the 

38 


COURAGE 





battlements of Christianity and there 
look for refuge, for their own security. 
“Tike a mighty army, moves the 
church of God.” Do you think that is 
characteristic of us today, that we move 
forward fearlessly and courageously 
against the enemies of our time? The 
church is more like a hospital for 
crippled children than like an army of 
soldiers. 

Over there in the subway is an in- 
vention for the lazy called a moving 
stairway. All you have to do is get 
on it and without any effort of your 
own it carries you up to the next floor. 
Some people look upon the church as 
a kind of moving stairway. All you 
have to do is to get into it, and it will 
carry you straight up to heaven with- 
out any effort on your part. Do you 
think with this kind of idea the church 
will ever develop heroes and make us 
courageous? 

39 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





It is not Christianity on the defense, 
but Christianity on the attack, which 
reveals the superior qualities of our 
religion. Sometimes I think that we 
are defending things altogether too 
much today; for when you are con- 
stantly called upon to defend a thing 
you are likely to make people suspicious 
about its strength. When a woman 
always finds it necessary to assert her 
chastity I think perhaps we would be 
suspicious about it, and we would say, 
“Methinks the lady doth protest too 
much.” ‘There is a good deal of this 
sort of thing about the present defense 
of Christianity. Christianity can take 
care of itself. There is not so much 
necessity of our always running to 
bolster up some doctrine or some 
dogma. What we should do is to be 
on the aggressive, for it is in the attack 
that Christianity reveals its highest 
and its most enduring qualities. So I 

40 


COURAGE 





say to you, that no man can be a real 
disciple of Christ unless he shows 
courage. 

Now, there are two kinds of courage. 
There is the courage for critical occa- 
sions, and there is the courage for the 
commonplace, ordinary duties of life. 
If you ask me, I will tell you that the 
second kind of courage is the superior. 
For on critical occasions we are borne 
up by the excitement and the glory of 
the hour, and very few men fail in 
circumstances of that kind. But it is 
the constant, plodding, persistent 
duties of the everyday that require the 
commonplace kind of courage which 
demands all the strength and power 
that there is in a man. 

I knew a soldier overseas who won 
the Victoria Cross in a most brilliant 
dash of courage, and then he went 
home to live and he was drunk all the 
time. He was a victim of social 

41 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





custom. He had the courage to do a 
brave thing under the excitement and 
thrill of the battle, but he did not have 
the commonplace courage to resist 
social invitations to make a beast of 
himself. And so I tell you that it is 
the courage in the ordinary, common- 
place duties of life that is the great 
test of a Christian. 

They say that when Captain Scott 
was returning from that terrific journey 
to the South Pole, the feet of the men 
were frostbitten, and some of them 
were discouraged and desired to lie 
down and die. Then he gave out this 
command, “‘Men, slog on; slog on!” 
I tell you, it is the slogging on in the 
face of what seem to be insuperable 
difficulties in the ordinary, trying, 
trivial things of life, that requires 
much courage. 

You young men, in the face of all the 
temptations which meet your everyday 

42 


COURAGE 





life, perhaps when you are alone, when 
there is nobody to cheer you, when the 
friends that you ought to look to for 
support fail you—then is the hour 
when you need courage. Be strong 
and of a good courage, and go on 
loyally in the ordinary commonplace 
duties of life. 

I knew another soldier overseas who 
had been an absolute failure at home. 
When he was recommended for the 
croix de guerre, he refused it. He said, 
“T won’t take a decoration for bravery 
here until I go home and make good 
there; then I will accept the croix de 
guerre.’ AndIam sure that we admire 
that kind of courage, that was not 
going to be decorated for some magnifi- 
cent outburst; because courage is not 
an occasional thing, it is a habit of the 
soul. It is an essential, dominant, per- 
sistent, never-dying characteristic of 
our humanity. We need to practice 

43 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





and exercise it every hour of our lives. 
Particularly is it hard to have when 
you are alone. The battles of peace 
are harder to win than the battles of 
war. Victory in peace times is not an 
easy thing, as we are beginning to un- 
derstand since the War. Much more 
easy was it to win victory in the Great 
War than it is to win victory in these 
times of peace, because it requires the 
commonplace kind of courage. And 
that is the kind that we are in need of 
just now. 

But courage is not a contradiction to 
fear, because it is cowardice that is the 
opposite of courage. There are lots 
of people who are afraid, but they 
conquer their fears and go forward. 
I like that story told of King Henry 
IV of France. He was a great soldier, 
but he never went into a fight that he 
did not turn ashen pale and his knees 
begin to tremble. On one occasion, 

+4 


COURAGE 





when his body seemed to be in a great 
state of fear, he looked down at his 
knees and said, “Tremble, you vile 
things; you would tremble a lot more 
if you knew where I was going to take 
you in half an hour.”” That is the kind 
of courage we want when all our desires 
and our temptations are to run away. 
It is a courage that is superior to fear. 
We want it today. A young man 
down at one of our bathing places, 
one of those “‘sloppy Susan”’ kind of 
men, complained to a comrade that 
his mouth was full of sand. His com- 
rade said, ‘“‘Swallow some of it; you 
need it in your system.” ‘There are a 
great many people who need some kind 
of grit in order to bear them over the 
hard places of life. 

Now, I want to give you a few simple 
rules for this courage of ours. How 
do we get it, and what is the secret of 
it? The secret of courage is, first of 

45 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





all, an overmastering sense of the 
presence of God. You know no man 
ever does any great things until he is 
moved and actuated and compelled by 
some person or fired by some cause. 
All the courageous deeds of history 
have been achieved by that very sense 
of presence. That is how Joshua be- 
came courageous. God said, ‘‘Have 
not I commanded thee? Be strong 
and of a good courage. As I have been 
with Moses, so will I be with thee. Be 
not discouraged nor dismayed. Go 
forward.” It was the presence of God 
that kept him up. It was the presence 
of God that was the strength of the 
courage of Jesus. And I tell you, 
friends, if you get into your hearts that 
God is on your side and that man can- 
not stand against you, if you have that 
presence always with you, you will be 
courageous and you will never become 
cowards. I believe that we are cow- 
46 


COURAGE 





ards because we think too much about 
ourselves—our own pains, our own 
dangers, our own inconveniences. But 
you get a man who can forget himself, 
and then he will do brave things. The 
mother that forgets herself and thinks 
of her baby will stand and fight like a 
tigress in defense of her child, because 
she is thinking not of herself but of her 
baby. The lover will protect his be- 
loved with his very life. The patriot 
will throw himself against the enemy 
because of his country’s cause. And 
if we can have such self-forgetfulness, 
then we will be courageous. 

We need also great faith in our cause. 
Sometimes we lack faith. We have a 
sort of half-faith in Christianity, in- 
stead of believing that Jesus must be 
invincible. Somebody asked an Amer- 
ican hero in the Civil War, “How is it 
your regiment always seems to con- 
quer? Why don’t the other regiments 

AT 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





have victory sometimes?” He said, 
“Tt is because they lack a cause. They 
have not the same faith in their cause 
that we have.” It is such faith that 
subdues kingdoms, waxes valiant in 
fight, turns to flight the armies of the 
alien, pierces through mountains, leaps 
over all kinds of obstacles and diffi- 
culties, will not be turned back. It is 
faith that makes a man courageous. 
There is one more thing that will 
give courage, and that is hope. Nothing 
will make a man so much a coward as 
despair. Amundsen said so when on 
his polar expedition. When they had 
reached the Pole, the men suddenly 
became discouraged. He asked why 
it was, and he realized it was because 
their hope had been fulfilled to get to 
the Pole, and now, having no hope to 
urge them on, they fell back and be- 
came slow. It is hope that keeps a 
man brave—hope, even in the face of 
48 


COURAGE 





evidences that seem to contradict our 
hope. ‘We are saved by hope.” 

Let me tell you a little story in con- 
clusion. It is a fine illustration of 
courage. You remember Henley the 
poet. He had something the matter 
with his foot, and he went and con- 
sulted a famous surgeon. The doctor 
said to him, “I think I can save your 
foot, but it will mean twenty months 
of agony. You will have to lie on your 
back with your feet up for weeks, and 
every moment will be painful.” Hen- 
ley said, ““Go ahead.” And while he 
was being saved, with the agony of 
twenty months’ pain, he wrote this 
poem: 


Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods there be 
For my unconquerable soul. 


In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud; 
4 49 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 


It matters not how strait the gate 

How charged with punishment the scroll; 
I am the captain of my fate; 

I am the master of my soul. 


He came through, bearing upon his 
body the marks of his courage, for he 
limped all the years of his life. That 
is the kind of courage we want. If 
you manifest it in your whole life, you 
too will be able to say, “I bear upon 
my life the brand of the Lord Jesus, 
the mark of courage.” 


50 


iil 
PATIENCE 





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PATIENCE 


I want to think with you about an- 
other mark of the Christian, perhaps 
more typical than the two I have 
mentioned, and certainly just as neces- 
sary—the mark of Patience. I hope 
you see how one mark necessitates the 
other. They are all linked together; 
they are interdependent. Loyalty is 
a difficult thing and requires courage; 
and courage very often is nothing more 
than patient endurance. So you see 
that these marks are all dovetailed 
together; you cannot separate them. 

There have been few characters of 
history so remarkable for patience as 
Paul. I will give you just one illus- 

53 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


tration of it. St. Paul suffered from 
some unknown bodily affliction. He 
calls it “a thorn in the flesh.” We 
have not been able to gather what its 
exact character was, but it must have 
given him a great.deal of trouble, for 
he prayed again and again to be de- 
livered from it. But he got no deliver- 
ance, and all that God said to him was, 
*“My grace is sufficient for you. Go 
and patiently bear this affliction of 
yours; for it is the only thing for you 
to do.”’ Sometimes we fret and mur- 
mur because the burdens of life are 
not lifted from us. It might be the 
worst thing to happen. The better 
thing is to get strength to carry the 
burden; and God always provides 
that, if we ask Him for it. St. Paul 
therefore bore always in his life the 
mark of patience. 

In this particular he was but a dis- 
ciple of the Master; for Jesus mani- 

54 


PATIENCE 





fested a remarkable patience. There 
is not a single touch of impatience or 
fret or worry about the life of our Lord. 
He moves through the pages of the 
Gospels with an absolute calmness, an 
unhurried patience. Time and time 
again they tried to precipitate matters, 
to get Him to hurry a bit, and He said, 
“Mine hour is not yet come.” How 
very patient He was with the slow- 
witted disciples! Again and again He 
said, “Do ye not yet understand?” 
And He went on patiently, toilingly, 
without the least exasperation, en- 
deavoring to commit His teaching to 
their stupid minds; and all through 
the Passion He exhibited a very won- 
derful patience. So this is an essential 
and indispensable mark of a Christian 
—patience! 

It is very much needed, for we are 
not a very patient people. We live in 
an age of hurry and bustle. The 

55 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





slogan of our time is, “Make it 
snappy!”’ Everybody wants you to 
be on the continual go. When I was a 
boy I used often to see placarded up 
three letters, B B B, which meant 
Burdock Blood Bitters. But today 
we have B B B, and it means Bright, 
Brief, and Breezy. This is a char- 
acteristic not only of our whole life, 
but particularly of our religion. People 
are impatient of long services. They 
want their religion served up in tabloid 
form, a sort of spiritual pemmican. 
There is not the spirit of patience, I am 
afraid, manifested in our modern life; 
and because we are not patient we 
lose a great deal of the joy and the 
glory and the real spiritual value of 
our living. “He that believeth shall 
not make haste,” for leisureliness is 
absolutely necessary in order that we 
shall get the highest and the deepest 
values out of our life. 
56 


PATIENCE 





Now, this matter of patience is very 
difficult, and it has been very fre- 
quently misunderstood. Patience has 
usually been thought of as a passive 
virtue, whereas it shows its most 
splendid qualities on its active side 
rather than on its passive. It has of 
course this double relation. It is both 
passive and active, as I hope to show 
you in a moment. But patience— 
what exactly does it mean? You know 
it is a borrowed word; it is not English 
in its derivation, and it simply means 
one who is willing to suffer, who does 
not take things too easily, who is will- 
ing to manifest in his life a capacity 
for endurance, for suffering, for re- 
straint, for self-control. 

Perhaps I had better just single out 
one by one the necessary elements of 
patience, in order to show you exactly 
what is required. One of the essential 
qualities of patience is the ability to 

57 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





wait; and that is one of the things 
that we have not been greatly schooled 
in. During the War, we who were 
overseas knew that the ability to wait, 
to hold ourselves in leash, to wait until 
the time came for action, was one of 
the most necessary things of our ex- 
perience. We have all realized what is 
called “the psychological moment’’; 
if you act before the time you are only 
going to interfere with matters—you 
are only going to lose a great deal of 
the value of life. The man who knows 
how to hold himself back until the 
right moment arrives, who is not 
precipitate and rash and extravagant, 
is the man who will get the most out 
of his life. So that waiting is one of 
the necessary elements of patience. 
Some years ago there was a great 
mine disaster in the Western States, 
when a large number of men were 
buried. It was not known whether 
58 


PATIENCE 


they were dead or living. The mothers 
and the wives and the children were 
all at the pit-head and they could not 
do anything. They just had to wait 
until the buckets came up to bring the 
news whether their husbands and sons 
were living. And some of them broke 
under the tenseness of waiting; the 
nervous strain was so great that they 
collapsed. When at last the first word 
came up and they were told to go and 
get blankets, it was a great relief; the 
period of waiting was over. But I tell 
you, friends, it is such patience, in the 
sense of waiting, that we want very 
much to exercise in these days of ours. 

Then in the idea of patience there is 
resignation. This is a virtue not 
always in demand, for sometimes we 
practice resignation when we ought to 
be impatient. We sit down under 
things and bear them when neither 
God nor man demands that we should 

59 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





bear them. Some people use patience 
as another word for indifference, or for 
laziness or sloth. We blame God for 
a great deal, and say “It is the will of 
God” that we should patiently sub- 
mit. I think that about seventy per 
cent of the things we call the will of 
God are not the will of God at all; 
these troubles have been brought on 
us by our own stupidity and the sin 
and rascality of man. Some child dies 
of fever, and its mother says “‘It is the 
will of God.” It is nothing of the 
kind; it is just a condition of filth and 
contagion in the city. And when 
people die in tenements like flies and 
then talk about resigning themselves 
to the will of God, they misconstrue 
the whole idea of Christianity. 

But there must be resignation at 
some times in our lives. We must 
understand when it is really the will of 
God; then we must submit patiently 

60 


PATIENCE 





and bear that which we know in 
our hearts and consciences is ours to 
bear. Our own hearts and consciences 
are the only guides to us to bear what 
has been set for us. 

Then patience means endurance— 
the ability to see a thing through; and 
here is where a great many people fail. 
You business men know how many 
start out with high enthusiasm and 
fall by the way. Statistics tell us that 
of a hundred young men, who start 
out with ability and opportunity, only 
five ever reach complete success. The 
other ninety-five fall by the way, be- 
cause they have not the stick-at-ive- 
ness to see the thing through. They 
have not the patience to wait; they 
have not the ability of endurance. 
And there are a good many like that in 
the Christian church. Boys and girls 
in the Sunday school come up to con- 
firmation, and after that they fade 

61 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


away and we never see them any more, 
because they have not the endurance 
to stand the strain of Christian duty 
and to meet the responsibilities that 
are resting upon them. 

We must learn to wait. “Milton said, 
“They also serve who only stand and 
wait.” We must have resignation. 
“Thy will, not mine, O Lord, be done.” 
We must have endurance. “Blessed is 
the man that endureth to the end, for 
he shall receive a crown of life.’ But 
now we come to the active side of 
patience, and I am going to give you 
another motto: “Let us run with 
patience the race that is set before us.” 
You know that an impatient batter 
can very easily throw away the game; 
it is the man who knows how to hold 
himself in with an iron discipline and 
control until the right moment comes 
and then releases his energy, who will 
win. Watch the man down in the 

62 


PATIENCE 





arena. ‘There he is out racing with his 
competitors, and you can just see how 
he holds himself in restraint. He won’t 
put all his strength into the first hun- 
dred yards. He will wait until he is 
three-fourths over the course, and then 
he will open up his reserve and let go 
all his energy. 

Do you know that Philip Doddridge 
has written a hymn which exactly 
demonstrates this active side of? pa- 
tience? 


Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve, 
And press with vigor on! 

A heavenly race demands thy zeal, 
And an immortal crown. 


Is there enough stretching of nerves 
about our religion? Are we taut and 
tense to the endeavors of our Christian 
living? Is not this “walk” of ours a 
leisurely kind of business, a sort of go- 
as-you-please membership in the Chris- 

63 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





tian church? What have we sacrificed? 
Have we suffered? Have we bled? 
Have we made any sacrifice for our 
Christianity? Have we patience, in 
the sense of suffering for our great 
cause? 

I am going to give you three or four 
cases in life where patience is absolutely 
necessary, but also very difficult. The 
first is when we are in the presence of 
mysteries that we don’t understand. 
That is the time when we need to be 
patient and wait until God is pleased 
to show us the explanation. How 
many people there are who throw over 
their religion because there is some 
difficulty that they are unable to com- 
prehend! George Eliot, the great 
writer, dropped her faith in eleven 
days. Robert Elsmere dropped his in 
seven days. Not so very long ago a 
young man came up to me and said he 
had just read a pamphlet of fifty pages, 

64 


PATIENCE 


eS 
a criticism of the Old Testament. And 
he said, “My faith goes by the board, 
because I cannot understand these 
things.” He had no patience in the 
presence of inscrutable mysteries. I 
we were to throw over everything for 
so slight an occasion there would never 
be anything left! How much do we 
understand about life? There are 
inscrutable riddles on all sides of us, 
and the only thing for us to do is to be 
patient until the revelation comes, or 
until we have the capacity to receive 
that which God is just waiting to give 
if only we are able to receive it. Jesus 
said, “I have yet many things to say 
unto you, but ye are not able to receive 
them now.” It is only because we 
lack the capacity; and just as soon as 
we shall become qualified for the 
reception of this revelation, He will 
give it to us. In the meantime we 
must patiently wait, take it on trust 
5 65 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





awhile, until God is pleased to reveal 
this thing to us. 

A second occasion in life when 
patience is difficult is under a sense of 
disappointment. You know some- 
times how our hopes are blasted and 
our expectations are unfulfilled. That 
is the time when it is very hard for us 
to be patient. We just simply want 
to cry out against the injustice of 
the thing. Principal Rainy was one 
of the great leaders in Scotland; he 
was fighting for a long number of 
years for the union of the Scotch 
churches, and at last it came up in 
Parliament. He sat in the gallery on 
the night when the vote was taken, 
and when it was taken he was de- 
feated. He went back home with his 
friend. Not a word of impatience was 
spoken. He sat down and said, “I 
wish I were ten years younger, so that 
I could take it up all over again.” He 

66 


PATIENCE 


——— 


did take it up, and ere long it went 
through magnificently. This is the 
kind of patience we need in our dis- 
appointment. Oh, that we had just 
this kind of endurance, to take up our 
cross again and go forward! For I 
measure a man not by the number of 
his falls, but by the times he gets on 
his feet and goes forward to the fight. 

Another occasion in life when it is 
difficult to be patient is when things 
are moving slowly, when we are in the 
presence of a loitering progress. People 
are walking, and we want them to run; 
and they are running, and we want 
them to fly. Nothing is more difficult 
than to be patient when things seem 
to move altogether too slowly for us. 
I like the parent who is always patient 
with the stupid member of the family. 
Some of us would have had a hard 
time of it if the fathers and mothers 
had only looked after the brilliant ones. 

67 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


I like the teacher of the class who 
takes a lot of pains with the dull and 
backward pupils. And if God did not 
take a lot of pains with some of us who 
are so stupid and slow, I wonder what 
would become of us. 

So to him who exercises patience in 
these circumstances, in the presence of 
mystery, under the burden of dis- 
appointment, when things are slow, 
God will give his own recognition. The 
poor little girl in London died. She 
had spent all her life in a patient effort 
to bring up a little family and she had 
gnarled and broken fingers and hands. 
The clergyman said to her, ‘‘When 
you meet your Saviour just show Him 
your hands. He will see you bear on 
your body the marks of patience.” 

Do you bear on your body the mark 
of patience? It is a mark of the Lord 
Jesus. Without it you may never be 
able to see His face. 

68 


IV 
HUMILITY 





HUMILITY 


Now we reach the most difficult of 
all the marks of a Christian, and yet 
one that is the most essential and char- 
acteristic. It is Humility. Christian- 
ity made humility a virtue. It was 
not a virtue before the days of Christ. 
You could not insult a man more in 
the pre-Christian times than to say he 
was humble. It was considered to be 
a quality of a slave, and therefore was 
absolutely scorned. But when Jesus 
came into the world He lifted it to a 
place of great dignity, and ever since 
that time humility has been looked 
upon as one of the dominant charac- 
teristics of a Christian. 

71 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


Let me give you a simple illustra- 
tion of the humility of Paul. The 
most beautiful of all his letters is the 
letter he wrote to Philemon, when he 
committed to his tender mercy the 
slave Onesimus. Now, you need to 
understand the position of a slave in 
the days of the Roman Empire in 
order to understand how condescending 
was the act of Paul when he took this 
slave and made him his brother. Only 
Christianity could have persuaded him 
to do so humble and yet so glorious a 
thing as to elevate a man from the 
degrading position of a slave into that 
of a Christian brother. 

The mark of humility is undoubtedly 
found in the life of Jesus. He said, 
“Learn of Me, for I am meek and 
lowly.” There is not a suspicion of 
pride or haughtiness or arrogance in 
the whole of His life. He always 
appears in the garb of a servant, and 

72 


HUMILITY 





on the night before He died, you re- 
member how He took a towel and 
girded Himself and washed the dis- 
ciples’ feet, in order to give them an 
example of humility. He said, “I have 
given you an example that ye should 
do unto others as I have done unto 
you.” And there is no more magnifi- 
cent illustration of humility than the 
cross; for it was a thing of shame and 
degradation, and yet Jesus has, by 
dying on the cross, lifted it to a position 
of moral glory and dignity. Humility, 
therefore, you will admit, must be 
demonstrated in the life of anyone who 
would call himself a disciple of the 
Master. 

I believe, again, that this is a spe- 
cially necessary characteristic in these 
days of ours, for we are not a very 
humble people. We talk in super- 
latives. I am amazed how often men 
will sit by the hour and talk about 

73 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





themselves. Did you ever hear any 
man tell you a story where he was not 
the hero? If you ever meet one who 
will tell you of an incident when he 
was the defeated party, when he got a 
‘licking,’ write it down as a very 
hopeful sign. But you won’t very 
often. We hear such things as this: 
the largest circulation, the finest goods, 
the prettiest dress, the largest congre- 
gation, the highest salaried officials, 
the most eloquent preacher; and so 
all the way it goes on, dealing with 
these terms of pride and of exaltation. 
You must admit that we do need a 
little more modesty and a little more 
humility in these modern times. 
Emerson, the great American essay- 
ist, said, “The positive is the muscle of 
the speech and the superlative is the 
fat.” If that be true, then our speech 
is suffering from fatty degeneration of 
the heart; for never was there a time 
7A 


HUMILITY 





when there were so many superlatives 
used, and modesty is not a very dom- 
inant characteristic of ours. 

Humility teaches us that the way up 
is down. There is a very fine passage 
in one of John Wesley’s hymns: “Sink 
me to perfection’s heights.” There is 
almost a contradiction in it, and yet 
we know that the only way for us to be 
lifted up to perfection is by our passing 
through the valley of humiliation. Hu- 
mility is a dominant characteristic of 
all the greatest souls of history. 

The church particularly needs hu- 
mility for I hear the different denom- 
inations frequently boasting that they 
and they only have the way of salva- 
tion, that they have all the truth, that 
in them alone is the right doctrine of 
Christianity interpreted. I say to 
myself, ““O God, if we could only give 
our churches and our preachers and 
our congregations a little more humil- 

15 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


ity, so that they will not always be 
advertising themselves and flaunting 
their superiority over others in the face 
of the public!” 

There is no more dreadful sin in the 
world than the sin of scorn. “Blessed 
is the man who hath not sat in the seat 
of the scornful.” When I hear scorn 
poured out upon people who don’t walk 
in the same way with us, I wonder if 
we have learned the lesson of humility. 
Jesus, when He saw men all scrambling 
for the high seats, said, “Go and sit 
down in the lowest room; for he that 
humbleth himself shall be exalted, and 
he that exalteth himself shall be 
abased.”’ 

Now let me tell you, first of all, what 
humility is not; because it is very 
frequently misinterpreted. Humility 
is not a cringing, fawning attitude. I 
suppose that Dickens has forever made 
ridiculous and contemptible that kind 

76 


HUMILITY 





of humility—those people who come 
to you washing their hands with in- 
visible soap and fawning and cringing 
and making themselves very obsequl- 
ous. You know very well that this is 
not the right interpretation of humility. 
There was nothing cringing or fawn- 
ing about the Lord Jesus, and yet He 
was the humblest soul in history. 
Neither is humility self-depreciation. 
Those people are for the most part 
frauds who are always underestimat- 
ing themselves, who are saying that 
they are not clever, that they are not 
this or they are not that. After all, 
this is a kind of pride; it is false 
humility. A story is told of a philos- 
opher of Greece who went around 
clothed in rags in order that he might 
draw the attention of the public to his 
humility. Somebody said, you could 
see his pride peeping out of the holes 
in his garments; and that is very 
77 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





frequently the case. No, humility is 
not self-depreciation. 

And then, humility is not based on 
our sin and guilt. It has a different 
origin from that. Jesus was humble, 
but there is not in all His life the 
slightest consciousness of guilt. So do 
not think for a moment that humility 
springs out of our demerits or out of 
our guilt and sin. It must have a 
different origin from that. 

So these three things are not char- 
acteristic of humility—a cringing obse- 
quiousness, or self-depreciation, or a 
sense of our guilt and sin. It must 
have a different origin altogether. 

What is humility? Humility is just 
a modest estimate of one’s self. After 
all, every estimate is relative; all 
standards are comparative; and it 
depends entirely upon what standard is 
used as to whether you are going to be 
humble or not. When the Pharisee 

78 


HUMILITY 





came to say his prayers he had a com- 
parison. He said, “I thank God that 
I am not as other men are,” and look- 
ing round about him and seeing one 
other man he was lifted up with pride 
because he adopted the wrong standard. 
This comparative method is what 
brings us into pride and arrogance, for 
it is the easiest thing in the world to 
find people who are our inferiors. It is 
the easiest thing in the world to find 
something in yourself which is more 
excellent than in other people, and 
there is nothing more cheap than to do 
that very kind of thing. 

I remember some years ago that a 
public entertainment was coming to 
the town where I happened to be 
living. When afterward I took excep- 
tion to one of the members of the 
company he was very angry and wrote 
back and called me all kinds of names. 
He said I was a twopenny-halfpenny 

79 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


curate and that he could earn more 
money in one night than I could earn 
in a whole year. Therefore he was a 
much greater man than I was. The 
whole of his letter was just one out- 
pouring of pride and arrogance, the 
arrogance of wealth because he could 
scratch in the dollars. It is the easiest 
thing in the world for us to find some- 
thing where we excel and to hold that 
up. And you know, when we make 
these comparisons, we generally pick 
out the inferiorities of others and our 
own superiorities, and bring them into 
contrast; and they always, of course, 
lead us into pride. 

I want to give you proper standards 
of comparison. It is not by the rela- 
tive, but by the absolute, that you 
must measure your life. You know 
that old proverb, ‘Better to be ruler 
in this city than second man in Rome.” 
It is one of the stupidest proverbs in 

80 


HUMILITY 





existence. You are the biggest man 
in a little city, but you are not nearly 
as big a man as you ought to be. I 
say, “‘Leave your little corner and 
match yourself against bigger men in 
order that you may be lifted up to 
your best. Don’t be always contrast- 
ing yourself with people smaller than 
you are. You ought to stand against 
the great characters of history, and 
then you will not be so.proud of your- 
self. The only absolute standard of 
life that we have is Jesus Christ. 
Instead of comparing yourself with 
other men, weak and faulty as you are, 
go and stand beside that matchless, 
peerless Life, and then you will be 
humbled to the ground.” I suppose 
that Mount Jefferson and Mount 
Washington up there in the White 
Mountains, when they look down on 
the little hills beneath them, must 
think they are the great summits of the 
6 81 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





world. But if they could go and stand 
beside Mont Blane or the Rocky 
Mountains, they would not be so proud 
of their inches. It depends entirely 
upon the standard. I give you that 
Standard which is the only standard 
that will bring us into a proper estimate 
of ourselves. Let us go and stand 
beside that Life, and He will bring us 
into humility. 

I remember a story of a young man 
who made application to go to China 
as a missionary, and when the board of 
examiners talked with him they felt 
that he would not suit at all. But he 
was so enthusiastic and zealous in the 
matter that they very timidly said to 
him, “How would you like to go as a 
servant?” He said, “I will be glad to 
be a hewer of wood or a drawer of 
water, if I can help at all in the great 
missionary cause of God.” Here was 
an evidence of humility that I am 

82 


HUMILITY 





sure we will all appreciate and admire. 

Let me give you another standard of 
measurement in order to teach you 
humility. We are so proud of what we 
do; but let us not be comparing our 
achievements with other achievements, 
but with what remains to be done. 
And when we look out upon the world 
and see how much still remains to do, 
will we be arrogant and haughty about 
what we have done? 

Some men pride themselves in the 
thought that they are self-made men. 
There is no such thing in all God’s 
world as a self-made man, for there were 
contributions to his making. He some- 
times is forgetful of all that had to be 
done in order to make it possible for 
him to achieve what he did. We take 
so many things to ourselves which we 
ought to accredit to others. Also 
when we look out and see how much 
misery there is in the world, how many 

83 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





tasks are left undone, how many build- 
ings are incomplete, is it possible for 
our hearts to be lifted up with pride 
and arrogance? Don’t think so much 
of the man you are, but of the man 
that you ought to be. If ever there is 
a person who is tempted to be proud 
and arrogant because he has made 
something of his life, then I would like 
to draw the veil aside and show him 
how much greater, how much taller, 
how much more charitable, how much 
more loving he would be if he lived to 
the highest capacity. Until you do, 
you must not be exalted or arrogant 
over your achievements. 

God gives His blessings only to the 
man of humble mind. He has nothing 
to bestow upon the proud, the uplifted, 
and the arrogant. So let us come and 
learn the lesson of humility. “‘Chinese”’ 
Gordon, who was one of the greatest 
men of the British Empire, was apply- 

84 


HUMILITY 


ing once for a position that he had 
longed for all his life. At night after 
it had been given to him he went out 
into the desert, and somebody found 
him there kneeling in the sand and 
groaning out to God, “Oh, take me 
out of myself! Do not let me be up- 
lifted by this that has come to me. 
Teach me to be humble that I may be 
able to perform my duty all the better.” 
So he was one of the great souls. He 
bore in his life the mark of humility, 
which is a mark of the Lord Jesus. 
Therefore be ye also clothed with 
humility. 


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V 
FREEDOM 





FREEDOM 


And now we come to a mark which 
I am sure you will at once recognize 
as an essential of one who is a disciple 
of Jesus. It is the mark that St. Paul 
particularly refers to in the motto I 
chose for the direction of our thoughts. 
Let me repeat the whole statement for 
you: “Henceforth let no man trouble 
me, for I bear branded on my body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus.” The first 
phrase will show you what St. Paul 
means. He is claiming his freedom 
when he demands that no one interfere 
with him. He says, “The marks on 
my body show you that I am in the 
service of the Lord Jesus, and that fact 

89 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


makes me free from every other kind 
of servitude. Don’t let any man ask 
for my service. I am in the service of 
Jesus. Let no man interfere with me. 
Let there be no other claim upon me, 
for I have here the signs of my service 
to my Master, and that makes me free 
from all the bondages into which men 
might call me.” 

A little story will set forth very 
clearly what is meant. Years ago, 
when slaves were sold in Africa, an 
English nobleman was _ traveling 
through the country, and one day he 
visited the slave market-place and saw 
how flesh and blood were being sold and 
brought into bondage. He saw there 
a particularly fine specimen of human- 
ity, and he bought him in. Then he 
went up to this dark man and said, 
“You are now absolutely free, to go 
where you like and do what you like 
for your whole life. No man can call 

90 


FREEDOM 


you slave. You are perfectly at lib- 
erty to dispose of your time and 
strength as you desire.” And the dark 
man could not comprehend it, and 
said, “Do you mean that I am free to 
do exactly as I like with my life, that 
no man can dictate to me?” “Cer- 
tainly,” said the Englishman. “Then, 
sir,” he said, “I will tell you what I 
would like to do with my life. I 
would like to become your servant, to 
enter into your service as a valet, and 
for the rest of my life to try and show 
you how grateful I am that you have 
bought me out of the thraldom and 
bondage of slavery.”” “Henceforth let 
no man trouble me, for I bear on my 
body the mark of freedom. I am in 
the service of my generous Lord and 
Master.” 

This freedom is certainly a mark of 
Christ, for never was there a freer 
soul in all history than He, who was in 

91 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





bondage to no man. He was not held 
as a slave by traditions and conven- 
tions. He walked through all the 
traditions of His time, and _ they 
snapped under His feet like cobwebs. 
He said, “I will tell you the truth, and 
the truth shall make you free. So long 
as you are My disciples you are in the 
service of no other master. He that 
committeth sin is the slave of sin, but 
I have called you into the glorious 
liberty of the children of God.” So 
both St. Paul and his Master, Jesus, 
declare for us that freedom is an 
essential characteristic of a Christian. 
Now you live in a country that 
glories in the word “Liberty,’’ and we 
who live under the British flag also 
think that we are among the freest 
people of all history. And yet, when 
we look around us, can we be certain 
that we are just as free as we boast 
ourselves to be? Look for a few 
92 


FREEDOM 





moments at the conditions of our time, 
and search your own hearts as indi- 
viduals, and see if you are as free as 
you think yourselves to be. First of 
all, let us see about our affections. Is 
our love free? Have we not bound 
ourselves up by certain customs and 
conventions and parties and cliques? 
By our pride of race we have limited 
our affection to the people of our own 
speech and tongue. By our pride of 
birth we have constricted our hearts 
to the people of our own class in society. 
By our ecclesiastical prejudices we have 
cabined and coffined our affection with- 
in our own particular church and 
denomination. I do not think that 
our affection, our love, is as free as it 
ought to be! And there is nothing 
that impoverishes the soul so much as 
the limitation of our love and affec- 
tion. Do you Protestants love Roman 
Catholics? Do you Christians love 
93 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


Jews? Do you Americans love French 
people and Chinamen and Germans? 
Is your affection free, or are you 
limited to the people of your own par- 
ticular desires and speech and tongue 
and creed? 

Or look at it in the matter of our 
mind. Is our intellect free? How 
many of you allow your thoughts to 
roam out over the great world of liter- 
ature and intellectual progress? Are 
you hide-bound by traditions and cus- 
toms? “What was good enough for 
my mother is good enough for me” is 
about all the freedom of thought that 
there is among certain types of Chris- 
tians today. They do not believe, 
they do not wait for more truth to 
break out of God’s holy Word, and 
they hide themselves behind the bar- 
riers of ecclesiasticism or some other 
refuge, and never have any liberty of 
thought or any freedom of intellect to 

94 


FREEDOM 





find something new about the revela- 
tion of God. Our intellects are not 
free. 

Then as to conduct. We are often 
bound by continuation of customs. 
We have a sort of traditional righteous- 
ness. We live by ritual and by certain 
laws. Now, conduct can never be 
tied down by a fixed form. It must 
have direction, but it ought not to have 
definition. We ought always to be 
manifesting new ways of godliness, 
new ways of righteousness. Jesus said, 
“Except your righteousness shall ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the scribes 
and Pharisees, ye shall not enter into 
the kingdom of heaven.” We ought 
to be blossoming always in new mani- 
festations of the Spirit of God; for 
when the Spirit of Jesus takes hold of 
us it cannot confine itself within the 
ordinary practices and conventions of 
our time. All conventions are only 

95 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


conveniences. We get into a rut; and 
do you know what a rut is? A rut is 
only a grave with the ends knocked 
out. What we want to do is to have 
such liberty of action, such liberty of 
conduct, that the Spirit of God will be 
able to manifest itself in large and 
fresh and new and unprecedented ways. 

But the greatest tyranny of today is 
the tyranny of things. We are in 
bondage to business. We are in bond- 
age to our domestic responsibilities. 
We are slaves to society. Why, I have 
known a woman to be so broken down 
after the marriage of her daughter that 
she had to go to bed for twenty-four 
hours to rest up—just a slave to the 
practices and conventions of society! 
Yes, and I have known business men 
so absolutely in bondage to their 
business that they could not even take 
Sunday from it, but would go down to 
the office and apply themselves to 

96 


FREEDOM 





business even on the Lord’s day. They 
have become slaves to things. One of 
the wealthiest men of our time said, 
“Tf I had to live my life over again, I 
would not own so much; for the things 
we own we do not own; the things we 
own, own us, and sometimes they get 
on our backs and drive us down to 
death.” And is not that true? It is 
the tyranny of things, the bondage of 
materialism, which has us in its grip. 

Now I want to tell you what freedom 
is. Freedom is the ability of a man to 
live his life completely and unrestrict- 
edly. Let me repeat that: freedom is 
the ability of a man to live his life 
completely and unrestrictedly. But 
do you think that a man is living his 
life completely when he gives himself 
over to the desires of the flesh? A 
man says, “I am going to have my 
fling; I am not going to be tied down 
by any of your piety or your righteous- 

7 97 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


Hiitenshyral acacia et 
ness. If I want to drink I will drink; 
and if I want to gamble I will gamble.” 
And so he thinks that he is free; and 
the fool soon finds himself in the 
bondage of lust, or in the bondage of 
gambling, or in the bondage of in- 
temperance. He is a slave to the very 
longings and desires, for freedom in 
which he has made such a clamorous 
challenge. 

There is only one freedom that will 
keep you free from bondage, and that 
is the freedom of the service of God. 
A man only is free to live his life com- 
pletely, fully, most unrestrainedly, who 
has devoted himself to the service of 
the Lord Jesus Christ. 

There are two sources of freedom. 
There is freedom from within and 
freedom from without. Freedom from 
without means that all constraints 
and bondages that have bound us at 
the outset are off. And law, after all, 

98 


FREEDOM 





is just external restraint. If you break 
a man’s leg, the first thing that you do 
is to put it in splints, and you bandage 
it around and around; but you don’t 
expect to keep them on forever. Just 
as soon as the life within the leg begins 
to act, you can take off the splints and 
other bandages. But suppose all the 
constraints of law and of society were 
taken off your life tomorrow—do you 
think you could trust yourself? Sup- 
pose tomorrow someone should say to 
you, “You can do exactly as you like” 
—could you trust yourself? Could 
you trust your neighbor? A great 
many of our laws are only crutches and 
props to keep a man from falling. It 
is the life within, the freedom of the 
spirit, the inward principle of truth, 
of doing the will of God, that will 
release us from every outward con- 
straint and make us the most abso- 
lutely free people in the world. And 
99 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





there is no other real freedom. The 
highest freedom is the freedom of the 
soul, that can express itself in outward 
actions without constraint and dicta- 
tion. Children are brought up, and 
they must be restrained. But when 
we grow up to man’s estate, surely we 
have sufficient power within us to keep 
walking right without the aid of 
crutches and props of various kinds. 
Such is the freedom that the Lord 
Jesus Christ gives us. It sets us free 
from all the bondages of the flesh, from 
all the bondages of the world. 

Can you have any single doubt about 
this if you look over the life of the 
world and realize the men who have 
been guided by the principle of truth— 
by what is true, not by what is con- 
ventional; not by what is expedient, 
but by what is absolutely true and cor- 
rect? Such freedom is the only thing. 
People talk a great deal about their 

100 


FREEDOM 


rights. I wish to heaven sometimes 
that they would stop talking about 
their rights and talk more about their 
duties, because our duties are much 
more important than our rights; and 
it is our duty in the face of God, who 
has given us this freedom of ours, to 
dedicate it to Him. “Our wills are 
ours to make them Thine.” That is the 
real glory and boast of Christianity. 
Now, there are at least three times 
in life when your freedom must be 
limited. The first is in the interest of 
your own highest personal life and 
character. No man has a right to do 
anything that is going to cripple his 
soul. No man is free to do as he likes: 
he is free only to do as God likes, who 
is his Lord; and it is not his highest 
good that he will take his fling and 
bring his soul in bondage to corruption. 
If he does, then he is a slave; he is not 
free. So your freedom is limited by 
101 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





your own highest and best interests. 
Oh, young man and young woman! 
will you remember that, the next time 
you are tempted to have your fling? 
Especially ask yourself, “Is this going 
to help my soul? Will it tend to the 
development of the highest and freest 
manhood and womanhood?” 

The second limitation of our freedom 
is our love of our brother. We are not 
free to do things that will hurt our 
brother. Paul said, “If meat maketh 
my brother to offend, I will eat no 
meat as long as the world stands.” 
And when you remember that your 
brother for whom Jesus Christ died is 
endangered by your freedom, that 
what you claim for yourself is going to 
hurt him, will you do it? The prin- 
ciple of Christian brotherhood demands 
that weshallsometimes sacrifice even our 
own lives in the interests of our brother. 

The third limitation of our freedom 

102 


FREEDOM 





is the cause which we have espoused. 
A man is not free as long as he has 
elected to support a cause. He cannot 
do wholly as he likes. He is free to do 
only what is in the best interest of that 
cause of which he is an advocate. A 
Frenchman was wounded—he had lost 
an arm—and somebody said to him, 
“Oh, my dear fellow! you have lost an 
arm.” ‘‘No,” he said, “I did not lose 
an arm; I gave my arm for my coun- 
try’s freedom.” And he bore upon 
his body the mark of freedom: for it is 
better for a man to lose an arm than 
having two arms to go into the punish- 
ment of hell. 

So I claim for you and for me to be 
free only in the sense in which that 
word is properly interpreted, free as 
children of God to obey Him, and to 
submit our lives to His guidance. If you 
do that, then you will bear in your body 


the mark of the Lord Jesus. 
103 





VI 
GENEROSITY 


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nyt Dy \ J ei 
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GENEROSITY 


I have been a little puzzled about 
the choice of the closing mark. I 
wanted a word that would impress the 
idea of tenderness and compassion in 
our relation toward others. I thought 
of the word “love” but that has been 
so abused and narrowed down, and it 
has become somewhat sloppy and senti- 
mental, and I have therefore avoided it. 
I thought of the word “ charity,” which 
of course in its original meaning is one 
of the most rich and beautiful words 
in all our language; but it too has been 
strangely narrowed until it has an 
officialness and coldness about it, and 
we have the proverb, “As cold as 

107 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





charity.”’ I wanted, therefore, a word 
that would avoid all these limitations 
and be very comprehensive and warm 
in its meaning; and so I have chosen 
the word Generosity. It is one of the 
few words of our language that has not 
been abused, and the moment you talk 
of a man being generous, you get a 
very large and catholic idea both of his 
life and of his thought. So we will 
study the word “generosity” as the 
closing mark of a Christian. 

Let me remind you of our motto: “I 
bear branded upon me the marks of 
the Lord Jesus.” This brings our 
minds immediately back to Christ. He 
bore these marks originally, and cer- 
tainly there is no characteristic of His 
life more dominant than His generos- 
ity. He was the widest of men in His 
thought, in His life, in His attitude 
toward others. Although He was born 
of one of the most provincial races of 

108 


GENEROSITY 


the earth, of a race the most narrow 
and prejudiced in history, yet He was 
broad-minded, compassionate, and gen- 
erous almost to a fault. There is no 
suggestion of narrowness or of any 
limitations in all His life. Jew and 
Gentile, bond and free, male and 
female, rich and poor, all based a claim 
upon Him, and that claim was immedi- 
ately responded to in the most generous 
manner possible. So you will agree 
with me that generosity must be a 
characteristic of a disciple of the 
Master. 

St. Paul, who wrote these words, was 
also a very catholic-spirited man. He 
said, “I am made all things to all men.” 
He was born of the strictest sect of the 
Pharisees, and yet he allowed none of 
his prejudices to narrow his attitude 
toward others. He became perhaps 
the most liberal soul in all Christian 
history, ministering to people of all 

109 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





classes and conditions with a mind 
that was generous and a heart that was 
compassionate and a soul that was 
wide as the arms of the cross. Surely 
he was a generous-spirited man. 

We come now to consider this virtue. 
What do we mean by generosity? We 
mean a man’s doing a little more than 
might be expected of him. If he does 
only his duty he is not generous: he 
is merely just; but if he does a little 
more than may be justly demanded of 
him, if he exceeds justice in the point 
of duty, then he becomes generous. 

There are four classes of people in 
the world to whom we have to express 
some attitude and some sympathy, 
and I would just like briefly to touch 
upon them. The first class is our 
friends. It doesn’t require very much 
effort to induce us to be generous to 
our friends. And yet, strange to say, 
is it not often true that men are meaner 

110 


GENEROSITY 





with their close and loved ones than 
they are with a casual stranger? I 
know of no greater test of a Christian 
than the man who is generous to his 
family, generous to those who have the 
greatest claim upon him. The mean- 
est soul in the world is the husband 
who is narrow in his attitude toward 
his wife and his family; for when a 
man will not provide generously for 
those of his own household, then cer- 
tainly he has no claim to being a 
Christian, much less a_ generous 
Christian. 

The next group is our enemies. We 
all know very well that there is nothing 
harder in the world than to be generous 
to those who have hurt us, to those 
who have wounded us in some par- 
ticular. Yet you will admit that if 
there is any man who can do it, he is 
manifesting the true spirit of a 
Christian. 

111 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


The story is told of Abraham Lincoln, 
that once one of the bitterest of men 
toward him in the nation was Edwin 
M. Stanton. Stanton hated him so 
much that he said he didn’t see any 
reason for going away down to Africa 
to get a gorilla, when they had one in 
Abraham Lincoln. Yet Lincoln was 
so generous to Stanton, that when he 
wanted a secretary of war he appointed 
Stanton, because he believed that he 
had the qualifications for the position. 
And his generosity so won over his 
enemy that when the great president 
lay dead, Stanton said of him, “There 
is the greatest ruler of men that ever 
lived.” It was generosity to his 
enemies that made the greatness of the 
martyr president; and it is generosity 
toward our enemies that is the finest 
characteristic of a Christian. Listen 
to Jesus upon the cross: “Father, for- 
give them, for they know not what 

112 


GENEROSITY 


they do,” and you will realize that the 
most difficult and yet the most con- 
stantly Christlike characteristic of a 
Christian is to be generous to our 
enemies. 

Then there is generosity to our 
rivals, to those who are competing with 
us in the affairs of life. You business 
men know how hard it is. You pro- 
fessional men understand—to be gen- 
erous to those who are competing with 
you in business. You women know— 
to be generous to those who are your 
peers in society, who are perhaps 
demanding a little more attention, and 
getting it, than you. How very diffi- 
cult it is to be generous to those who 
are our rivals! There is nothing more 
difficult than that, for jealousy is one 
of the things that is constantly coming 
in and interfering with the spirit of 
generosity. 

I like that story of Maeterlinck. He 

. 113 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





is one of the great men of his nation, 
and at last they decided to honor him. 
He went to the committee and asked 
them instead of honoring him to give 
the honor to his great rival artist and 
poet. That is one of the finest ex- 
amples of generosity that I know of, 
that he was willing to make place for 
the man who was his rival in the favor 
of the public mind. It requires a 
great deal of generosity to be fair to 
your rivals. Yes, even in the church! 
There is little enough generosity when 
the Anglicans and the Presbyterians 
are jealous of each other, when a 
Methodist leader is viewed with jeal- 
ousy and distrust and suspicion by his 
brethren. His motives are questioned, 
or his methods are criticized, or they 
look upon him and add, with a shrug 
of the shoulders, “He is not quite 
orthodox,” and use all their influence 
to discredit him. Jealousy is the great 
114 


GENEROSITY 


enemy of generosity where our rivals 
are concerned. 

Then there is another class of people 
to whom it is very difficult to be gen- 
erous—people who are outside of our 
class, outside of our nation, outside of 
our creed. We will call them “out- 
siders”; I don’t know any word that 
will describe them better. How very 
difficult it is to be generous to them, 
for prejudice is always cropping up to 
hinder our generosity — prejudice ! 
Now, Jesus was never guilty of preju- 
dice, although He was a Jew according 
to the flesh. You see how kindly dis- 
posed and generous he was to the 
people outside His own race and outside 
His own creed. 

Today I received a letter written to 
me asking me why I have not pleaded 
for the negro. Have I not been talk- 
ing all through six days and saying 
that there ought to be no caste or creed 

115 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


or color in our religion? For Jesus is 
the Saviour of all men, and God hath 
made of one blood all nations of men 
to dwell upon the earth; and if there 
is any prejudice of color or of creed, 
then we have failed to measure up to 
the standard of Christianity. 

Now, these are the classes: Our 
opponents, our rivals, and the out- 
siders, to whom we need to practice 
generosity. 

Let me give you two or three motives 
for generosity, for you know that very 
often a deed of generosity is spoiled by 
its motive. Some people give because 
their names are going to be in the 
paper, because they are on the sub- 
scription list, because they are going to 
get something in return for it; and a 
quid pro quo is not generosity. 

Let me give you some motives that 
will lift generosity to a higher plane. 
One is this: ‘Freely ye have received; 

116 


GENEROSITY 


————— 


freely give.” It is because God has 
been generous to us. Oh! when you 
remember and think of all the streams 
of contribution that have come down 
through the years, ministering to your 
happiness, what have you today that 
you did not receive? The most price- 
less heritages that we possess today 
have been bequeathed to us, the lega- 
cies that have come from the men of 
the yesteryears. We hold in our hands 
the treasures of the men who have died, 
that have all come down from their 
day toours. “Freely ye have received; 
freely give.”’ Be generous because you 
have been treated generously. I know 
of few better motives than this for 
generosity. 

Then the second motive is, because 
we are all stewards. Whatever we 
have we hold in trust. We did not 
receive these things entirely for our 
own appropriation. God has given 

bg 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 





you your talent, whether it be of music 
or money, or whatever it may be, in 
order that you may bless others with 
it. Itis not merely for your own selfish 
aggrandisement. And the man who 
believes that he is a steward, that he is 
holding these things in trust for the 
good of mankind, is bound to be 
generous. 

Another motive for our generosity is 
the good it does for others. Generosity 
makes decent men. You know that if 
you are being vindictive to a man he is 
bound to pay you back in your own 
coin. If you are suspicious of others 
they will be suspicious of you. There 
is nothing that will awaken generosity 
in a man’s soul like your own gen- 
erosity. The story is told that there 
was a man in the army during the 
Crimean War, who was a veritable 
black sheep. Everybody had his hand 
raised against him. He did not seem 

118 


GENEROSITY 


to be able to do right at all. And when 
he was brought before the colonel once 
for a criminal offense and the colonel 
was about to punish him severely, he 
said, “I am going to try generosity,” 
and forgave the man. Shortly after- 
ward the plague broke out there, and 
the man who did the best service was 
that black sheep. He caught the 
plague himself and died. It was an 
act of generosity in the colonel that 
awakened compassion and tenderness 
in the soul of that black sheep. And 
we have seen that happen time and 
time again. If you want generosity 
in others, be generous yourself. Thus 
the Christian centuries are bringing 
their tribute to Jesus, flowing back to 
Him in surging tides of gratitude be- 
cause He was the most generous soul 
of history. One other motive. Begen- 
erous because that is what makes you 
a better man. Nothing so strengthens 
119 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


your soul as generosity toward others. 
The story is told of Leonardo da Vinci 
that he had an enemy, and he decided 
that he was going to put that enemy 
of his in one of his pictures. So when 
he painted “The Last Supper” he 
painted the face of his enemy on the 
figure of Judas Iscariot. When he had 
done that he tried to paint the face of 
Christ and he could not do it. Every 
effort that he made failed, until at last 
he realized why it was—because vindic- 
tiveness in his soul was crippling his 
handicraft. He went and painted out 
the face of his enemy on the figure of 
Judas Iscariot, forgave him, and then 
came back and painted the face of 
Jesus Christ with great power. It is 
generosity that will make you a finer, a 
better, and a bigger soul. 

This is our last mark of a Christian--- 
broad, sympathetic, loving, warm, te - 
der compassion toward all men. 

120 


GENEROSITY 


Do you know that there are only 
two marks mentioned in the Bible— 
the mark of the Lord Jesus and the 
mark of the beast? I have been trying 
to set before you some marks of a 
Christian. Don’t you see the orches- 
tral effect of them? Every mark helps 
the others. Loyalty might become 
very narrow if it were not for patience. 
Courage might be a mere swagger and 
braggadocio without humility. And 
so one mark helps the other. In a 
great orchestra are the horns and the 
viols and the drums and the basses, 
and they all come in and make a 
glorious harmony. So these marks 
that I have given you, all coming in 
together, will make the harmonious 
and complete life of a Christian. 


If I can only leave with you that 
motto, “I bear branded on me the 
marks of the Lord Jesus,” so that you 

121 


MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN 


may never forget it, I will have done 
something. If I have taught you in 
any way something more of what it 
means to be a Christian, the glory, the 
inspiration, the happiness of dedicating 
oneself to the highest and the noblest 
as the servants of Him who is our 
Master and Saviour, then my work 
shall not have been in vain. 


122 


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